People used to instinctively wrinkle their nose when you told them you lived in Luton. They probably still do; it may be ten years since the place secured the Crap Town of the Year title, but it recently came runner-up for Ugliest Town in the UK. I always found plenty to love about it in spite of its concrete seventies eyesores: the pink flamingo statues that stood for no good reason in the Arndale Centre, but served the same function for the Luton youth as ‘beneath the clock at Waterloo’; the spiral exit ramp from the car park that my sister and I treated like a fairground ride and dubbed ‘the curly wurly’.
There was, too, a football club that even fans of Premiership teams knew about. This wasn’t because it was a thriving sporting concern but because it was the answer to various trivia questions: the giantkillers of Arsenal in the Littlewoods Cup final, the hosts of a horrifying night of hooliganism in 1985, one of the only teams in the league with an Astroturf pitch. You supported Luton Town by dint of having an LU2 postcode; whether you cared for football or not was fairly irrelevant. I went to the ground a few times with my friend Jonathan; it was cold, and the games were tedious, but I liked the feeling of belonging, of subscribing to a common heritage.
My cricketing allegiances were not as automatic. I had England, and that was non-negotiable, but a true fan was also supposed to have a club or county side. This was what grounded you, the earthy, rootsy diet that nourished you in between internationals. Supporting just the national side was, in those days when the English game as a whole was paid for and marshalled by the counties, the mark of a dilettante. So many kids are, of course, baptised into their sporting faiths before they’re old enough to make the decision for themselves; Dad, or sometimes Mum, has them in football replica kit as a toddler and before they know it, boom, they’re consigned to a life of lower-division misery with Notts County. But since I’d come to cricket relatively late, I had the freedom to choose.
Strictly, a Lutonian’s ‘home’ team was Bedfordshire, but it was only a minor county and did not play first-class cricket. I dismissed it as too small fry for my grand passions. Geographically, the next nearest teams were Northamptonshire and Middlesex; both offered a range of supportably high-profile players. I hated Northants’ colours, a vile combination of brownish maroon and yellow, so they were out. Middlesex were a tempting proposition. They played at Lord’s, the only ground I’d actually been to; they could boast a couple of my favourite England players (Angus Fraser and Phil Tufnell); and the three swords on their badge were pretty hardcore.
Also up for consideration was Atherton’s county side, Lancashire. It seemed, even to me, a bit of a stretch to support a team 170 miles away from where I lived, a place with which I had no history and whose principal city I could not have pointed to on a map. The only Lancastrians I could name with any certainty were the fictional occupants of the Rovers Return, and that purely because my nan had been a massive Corrie fan. There were no precious holiday memories to the Lake District. I harboured no profound love of the Manchester music scene – I hadn’t a clue who the Charlatans or the Stone Roses were, and genuinely thought Morrissey was a shorthand for the actor in Men Behaving Badly.
I remember, when cricket was still a novelty, sneaking upstairs to watch the TV in my parents’ bedroom one Saturday afternoon, having discovered that Lancashire were playing a Cup final at Lord’s. Downstairs there were chores to be done, and I stayed guiltily quiet when I heard Mum call for me, hoping she’d assume I wasn’t in the house. On the screen, the Lancashire captain Neil Fairbrother was standing in the field, biting his nails as Dominic Cork knocked his bowlers disrespectfully around. I found myself clenching my fists every time a fielder threw the ball, willing them to run Cork out, but they never did. Lancashire lost the game, and I felt a pleasurable ache of disappointment. The whole experience was enhanced by the knowledge that I had avoided doing the hoovering and secretly skirted my mother’s wrath.
Those sensations were enough to seal my commitment. I started looking for Lancashire’s results on Ceefax, reading up on their matches, and familiarising myself with their faces. I doubt I understood the word ‘yeoman’ back then, but I recognised something wholesomely ordinary in the features of players like Graham Lloyd and Gary Yates. Mike Watkinson looked as if he could be one of my dad’s commuting buddies. And it made me happy to discover that Ian Austin, a man who bowled with such parsimony, was actually shaped like a snowman.
Apart from a family trip to Scotland, I had never knowingly gone north of the Watford Gap. The fact that my new team contained straight-talking men who had grown up in the blunt, uncompromising environment of league cricket, and I was a preppy Home Counties girl of no little privilege, didn’t really occur to me. Sure, it was love across the divide, but I had no idea just how wide that gulf might be. And so, thanks to my utter lack of self-awareness, I felt no embarrassment about it at all, and identified myself with them freely.
My mother, who preferred Middlesex herself, was supportive of my choice. She had always admired Fairbrother’s England performances, and could scarcely blame her daughter for following an entirely unrelated northern team when she had been a Liverpool football fan since her teens (something to do with Tommy Smith). I had chosen well – over the next four years, my team reached five Lord’s finals, which gave me plenty to get excited about.
I wanted to wear my allegiance, literally, on my sleeve, and would pore over the Lancashire CCC mail order catalogue, coveting its replica shirts, embroidered caps and engraved pewter mugs. (I even wished I had a baby so I could snuggle it into one of their red rose-embossed baby-grows.) The clothes in the catalogue were modelled by the players themselves. They managed to prove that there is indeed a skill to leaning naturally against a fence, and that not all sportsmen possess it. On one page, a youngster with an upward profusion of blond hair appeared in various poses and casual wear. He smiled gamely at the camera in a hideous white tracksuit, while a woman wearing a matching jacket perched her hand affectedly on his shoulder. Still, he looked, of all the players, the most suited to the role of catalogue model. He might not have been Boden-handsome, but he could have held down a spot in Argos.
John Crawley was the great new hope, not just of the Lancashire side, but of England too. He was also, to those in the know, an Atherton mark II. His path had followed the England captain’s almost exactly: he had been a pupil at Manchester Grammar School, a few years below Atherton, and had, in time, broken the older boy’s school batting records. He had gone to Cambridge to read history, just as Atherton did, captained the Blues, just as Atherton did, and earned a Lancashire contract . . . well, you get the idea.
By the time I was filling out my own UCAS form, Crawley was making his England debut. He had only graduated the year previously, but he’d already scored vast amounts of runs for his county and made big centuries for the ‘junior’ national side known as England A. People said of Crawley that while he might look like Atherton’s shadow, he had the talent to surpass him. He was, the experts agreed, a far more gifted batsman, and his very existence seemed to justify everything I had admired about the England captain himself. It made me feel rather smug.
I had never felt so ambitious for another person. (If I’m honest, I’d never really felt ambitious for another person at all – other people’s achievements tended to grate.) It must have had something to do with the timing – he was just out of Cambridge, I was just applying – but when I looked at Crawley, I saw someone with a destiny, and I wanted him to achieve it. I cared deeply that he should win a regular place in the national side, and I was perfectly confident he would. He was, I felt sure, to be a key component of England’s glorious, world-beating future.
In my thoughts, he has always remained the corn-haired, gawky youth of the catalogue, a symbol of potential and aspiration. It’s why, when he got older, and fell out with Lancashire, and had Cherie Blair argue his employment case against them in the high court – incidentally one of the most glamorous things to happen to county cricket in the past 50 years – I kept only a half-ear on the outcome. I was losing my interest in Crawley even as he was losing his hair.
It is no spoiler to say that he did not become one of the country’s greatest Test batsmen, or an integral part of an Ashes-winning side. But he had a very successful county career, and by the time he retired, from Hampshire, he had amassed tens of thousands of first-class runs. I have no idea what happened to him after this. I’m rather warmed to discover, via a quick Google, that he’s making use of the degree he took. He’s teaching at a small but ancient establishment, the kind that was founded by a wealthy medieval churchman for education in Latin and Greek, and which now incubates future international rugby players. It’s something of a tradition, albeit one that’s fallen out of style, for retired cricketers to retreat to teach in the public schools of England. And we’ve already established how much I love an outdated convention.
His subject, naturally, is history. I feel that this is a sign. Partly because it was one of my own favourite subjects at school, and partly because it seems almost supernaturally apt, when I’m trying to track down England’s past. If Crawley is immersed in history every day, surely he’s the ideal person to give the considered, long view of the dark ages of English cricket?
He’s impossibly busy during term time, so he invites me up to his home over the Christmas holidays. I drive up the M1 with a cold and Now That’s What I Call Christmas blasting on the stereo. The satnav makes frequent and aggressive interruptions: ‘Hang all the mistletoe, and IN 200 YARDS, KEEP RIGHT.’ It’s a clear winter day, although for much of the journey all that affords is an unencumbered view of Northamptonshire’s flatlands and wind-farms.
It gets prettier once I turn off the motorway. There are fields and trees, a good-looking village with a cosy pub. A little way outside it I turn through Crawley’s gate; he comes to meet me at the door, an excitable pair of chocolate Labradors following him. I’ve all but lost my voice, so I croak out my greetings in the only register I can manage, which is somewhere between Bryn Terfel and Barry White.
Crawley is already different from how I’d pictured him: a creased, lined face, and a comfy-looking ensemble – soft-collared shirt, blue jersey, taupe trousers – that suggests he’s been the country gentleman for a while. You would never guess that the man before me is younger than Stewart, Atherton or Thorpe. He invites me through to the kitchen and puts on the kettle, and we chat about how he came to be living and working here, equidistant from the Lancashire hills where he began his playing career and the south coast where he finished it. He says that when he retired he tried out a job in the City, but the 5 a.m. commute was killing him after three weeks. So: school.
As we wander through Crawley’s very pleasant house to a day room, we pass evidence of his own children. A piano and a music stand both display rather advanced pieces – they’re clearly already discovering their talents. I wonder if it was always Crawley’s dream to be a professional cricketer. ‘It wasn’t, actually,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed football, and I was probably just as good at that until about the age of 14, 15, probably. What I didn’t ever develop was any pace, and without pace you can’t progress.’ But he had always played cricket with his elder brothers. ‘Mike Atherton and my eldest brother were in the same year and they were always around, so I was playing with them and progressing.’
Atherton was a decent footballer too, he says. ‘Everyone was well aware that he would go on to do great things.’
‘Then you came along and broke his school records.’
‘Yeah, but I think they’ve all been broken again since,’ he grins.
It’s not that long since Oxford and Cambridge universities, with their dispensation to play first-class cricket against the counties, were a customary career path for the brainy cricketer. Crawley’s brother Mark went to Oxford, but when I ask why he chose Cambridge instead, he answers obliquely, explaining that he couldn’t study modern languages as he’d wanted. ‘And, yes, Mike had gone there. We went to different colleges.’ It strikes me that maybe he doesn’t want people to think he was following in Atherton’s footsteps.
I wish I could, in all honesty, claim the same. Studying English at Cambridge had been my goal since I was ten (the only other thing I wanted as badly was a best actress Oscar that I could keep, with a mixture of irony and false modesty, in my downstairs bathroom). But when it came to choosing which college to apply to, the usual questions of prestige or teaching or suitability didn’t especially interest me. One afternoon in the summer of my lower sixth, a couple of our teachers took a small group of us on a day trip to Pembroke College, Cambridge, whose pen of English tutors was considered particularly fine. I wandered through the cloistered courts and passed through the ancient oak doors with a sense of awe. And then, at the first opportunity, I slipped away from the group to check out Atherton’s college, Downing.
It was the exact opposite to Pembroke – a large, geometric congregation of Georgian buildings facing each other grandly across an open quad. There were small purple flowers crowding in large Grecian urns outside the library, and students milling on the stone flank of steps that led to the chapel. The place seemed to radiate calm and a stately beneficence. I fell for it instantly. I had been primed to since the day I’d read its name next to Atherton’s entry in the first Playfair Cricket Annual I owned. This was where my hero had studied, even if, in reality, his cricketing obligations meant he had barely been here in the spring and summer months. By the time I had regained my group, my insides were buzzing with my secret expedition and Cambridge’s hidden medieval treasures had nothing to offer me in the face of Downing’s majestic austerity.
The sensation stuck. I found enough supporting circumstances to convince myself and my parents that Downing was a good choice, even if my teachers remained bemused. In the course of time I was invited for an interview and reiterated these reasons to the Downing admissions tutor, a large man with an extremely large beard and a thick plait of ginger hair that ended halfway down his back. He looked like a hippy version of W. G. Grace, which is perhaps why I came clean about my admiration of Michael Atherton. He turned very earnest and told me how good a student Atherton had been: ‘He almost got a first, you know!’
Back at school, I had never felt under so much pressure. I loved my subjects and my teachers, but I was studying alongside 120 highly strung young women, and we all felt our lives were about to be decided for good. The atmosphere was febrile; there were occasional outbreaks of hysterics, and not the funny kind. Having spent most of my life considering the classroom a competitive arena, sixth form was my Cup run, the build-up to the ultimate decider.
Luckily, I had Alex. I hadn’t come across Alex before sixth form, but it had turned out she was taking all the same classes as me. We were the only two girls in the entire school taking Latin, which made lessons a rather intense experience, and we were soon akin to sisters. She was kind, funny, smart, and the first school friend I’d had who made me feel completely at ease. She often knew what I was thinking before I said it and, despite being cleverer than me, she always made me feel more confident, not less. She patiently showed me how to translate our Latin homework, and when that didn’t work she let me copy hers.
We had plenty in common: we were the first girls in our school to play truant so we could see back-to-back Shakespeare plays in London. And though Alex had no love of cricket herself, she took mine seriously. In the few periods of the school week when we weren’t sitting next to each other in class, we would write each other letters. She filled hers with wild and witty imaginings of my secret life as a spy on life-or-death missions for the sake of the England team. If anyone in my life encouraged and fed my cricketing lunacy, it was Alex.
Instinctively, my new friend seemed to understand that cricket was my safety valve. I had other hobbies and interests, like music and drama, but they were contaminated by my own involvement, polluted with self-interest. Someone would play violin better than me, or get a better part in the school play, and suddenly my hobby was another blaring reminder of my own failures. But I wasn’t a cricketer, and I had no influence over the results – I couldn’t stop England losing if I tried.
When England were playing I cultivated my anxiety, a scratchy little ball of ‘what if?’ that I fed and cosseted like a pet. When they lost, it hurt, but it was a good, clean hurt, something invigorating, refreshing. It made me feel alive, and took my mind off the fact that I was turning 18 and had still never had a boyfriend, or that the goal I’d built my little life around was looming, or that everything I’d known was about to end, and something utterly unknown was about to begin.
So I poured myself into my alternative world, the way some of our classmates poured themselves into their earphones, communing with Cypress Hill and The Prodigy like shamans. My parents had given me a pocket longwave radio one Christmas, and it went with me from class to class (where it was occasionally confiscated), and to the common room, where I sat on a tattered foam chair in the corner inhaling microwave odours and watching the ritual stirring of Pot Noodles. I’d remain there in free periods, writing Alex letters, cocooned in the world of Test Match Special, where the brutal things happening on the pitch were described in gentle tones and the harsh reality of England’s fate was softened by Vic Marks’s chuckle.
My hopes and dreams were fused with those of the England team. Their performances, their failures, were somewhere my own tightly wound emotions could cut loose. John Crawley became my proxy, his achievements a modest covering for my own zealous ambition. After all, it wasn’t selfish to want to see Crawley do well, or arrogant to express pride in his scores – I could crow when his name was picked for the England team, and no one would think less of me.
I do not tell Crawley this as we sit in his living room drinking tea. But I do want to know if he was feeling the same desperate pangs to prove himself as I felt on his behalf. I remember the hype, the big county scores, the comparisons with Atherton. Atherton was, in fact, one of Crawley’s biggest fans. I have got a match programme in which Atherton talks him up as a possible England captain of the future. Was stuff like that a help or a hindrance? Bit of both, says Crawley. ‘I never had any issues with any kind of nepotistic tendencies because of the similar background or because we’d known each other a long time. That never really came up. And he was very fair.’
The summer of 1996 was a good one for both Crawley and me. I’d had an offer of a place at Downing; Crawley had got back into the England side. I got good A-level results; Crawley one-upped me by scoring his first Test century, against Pakistan. Up until that point, he had been a predominantly leg-side player – an observation that is usually an implicit criticism, since it makes a batsman look limited, as if they can only score the easy runs that come when a bowler is off-target. But against Pakistan Crawley revealed a selection of wristy cover-drives in an almost baroque style. He played three of them in one over against Pakistan’s feared spinner Mushtaq Ahmed; they came with a final flourish of the bat that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a cotillion.
Crawley remembers having to wait overnight to get his 100 because of the rain; he also remembers facing his Lancashire teammate Wasim Akram. ‘I think he was very nice to me in that first series,’ he says. ‘He and Waqar Younis were great because they tried to push the game on, which gave you opportunities to score, which is when I was at my most comfortable. I didn’t enjoy the likes of Glenn McGrath or Curtly Ambrose because they’re just metronomic and they’re so good at what they do the cricket becomes almost boring. They just wait for a mistake and never really bowl you something which actually gets you out.
‘But with Akram and Younis it was just a different game: they’re trying to get you out every single ball. And I enjoyed it. I had a few play and misses and was fortunate the ball didn’t reverse swing hugely in that particular game. I remember in the second innings, having got a hundred in the first, Wasim said enough’s enough, and bowled short ball after short ball. He had this ability to get the ball up to throat height from a decent length . . . I ended up fending off to silly point or someone.’
That series marked the beginning of Crawley’s longest run in the England side. The fickle finger of the selectors is a recurrent theme in my conversations with nineties players and Crawley’s Test career was as pebbledashed as any – picked for a Test series, deselected for the next, brought back for a couple of games, dropped for a few more. The England dressing-room had a speed-dating feel about it; players never knew who they might find themselves sitting next to, or whether this was their own last chance to make a good impression. Phil Tufnell, in his excitable way, had even acted out a little scene for me when we met in the pub. ‘You just put your kit down,’ he said, ‘and there’s another bloke in the dressing-room: “Hello, mate, all right, mate; good luck today!” “Got any advice?” “I dunno, just do what you did for your county and hope for the best!”’
It could make for a selfish environment. ‘You’re playing every game to stay in the next one,’ Graham Thorpe told me. ‘When blokes who have done well in their first couple of Test matches say, “It’s all for the team,” it’s not, really. That beginning is all about you.’ No one could feel settled in their place, and there was even an undercurrent of schadenfreude, because if someone else had a bad day, that was all the better for your prospects.
I knew that England selection was quixotic, but at the time I never really considered the impact on the players (they didn’t tend to mention it back then, presumably because they didn’t want to antagonise the selectors). My romanticised image of the England team was of a tight-knit crew, the kind of gang I hankered to be a member of. In reality it was a collection of names assembled at something approaching random, with one eye on each other’s failures. It doesn’t sound like a warm, nurturing place. ‘No, well, it wasn’t,’ says Crawley. ‘But we knew what the set-up was like. No one can whinge or cry that that was unfair.’
Personally, he thinks he was given ‘more than enough chances . . . I have no qualms about that. There were times when if I’d just kicked on in the odd game . . .’ He thinks, specifically, of a winter tour to Australia when he scored a couple of stylish 70s, then made two 0s in the final Test. ‘Athers always says the best way to survive in those circumstances is not get 0 and 1 but get 20 and 25. Then you’re just not doing badly enough to let them drop you.’
At the end of the Pakistan series I felt sure that Crawley had finally come of age in Test cricket, and he scored another century in his very next game in Zimbabwe. It was not, however, a happy tour. England were held to two draws by the hosts, a team that included part-timers like Eddo Brandes, a Harare-based chicken farmer. It was a humiliating result and one not helped by the insistence of the new coach – David Lloyd, who had replaced Ray Illingworth – that England had ‘flipping murdered ’em’. Crawley laughs a choking sort of laugh. ‘Well, we did play better than them but we didn’t actually win, so . . . yeah. We didn’t quite murder them.’
The England team were notoriously grumpy throughout the trip, thanks to Lloyd and Atherton’s decision to ban wives and girlfriends on a five-month tour that continued to New Zealand. ‘We did do some whinging, and we shouldn’t have done. But of all the managerial mistakes that was the biggest one . . . that’s where a huge amount of the problems happened. And it was a shame because Zimbabwe is such a lovely place.’ That’s not what a 25-year-old Crawley wrote in his tour diary for the Sunday Telegraph though. ‘Absolutely nothing to do,’ was how he described Bulawayo. ‘A document of . . . melancholy and despair,’ was how Ian Wooldridge, the great Mail sportswriter, described Crawley’s diary.
England lost all three of their one-day games against Zimbabwe, and moved on to New Zealand, where they drew a sure-thing victory in their first Test. I was exasperated. I had long been in thrall to the England team, held emotional hostage by their ups and downs, but I was beginning to discover that I could be irritated by them too. In previous winters I had staunchly defended their incompetence with the argument that they were young, inexperienced, and their time would come.
But Alex had brought the fresh perspective of an outsider to my thinking, and was sharpening my mind to a more critical edge. After all, we were nearly old enough to vote: it was time to demand answers from my team, rather than trusting them blindly. In our letters we discussed the cricket team’s ongoing crises with a radical, almost revolutionary bent. Our correspondence began to envisage coups in which we stormed English cricket’s HQ. Some were non-violent, others gleefully bloody.
Crawley always survived our imaginary takeovers, and for a while he kept his place in the real-life team as well. He played in 12 consecutive Tests until the end of 1997, and made a few decent scores, but far more single-figure ones. He just couldn’t seem to hang around. He calls it a career of ‘fits and starts’, and regrets the way he would ‘grind to a standstill’ against pace bowling. Jack Russell recalled an innings against West Indies when they were batting together and ‘Creepy couldn’t get a run, he was frightened to do anything.’ ‘I wish I’d had a bit more of a risk-taking outlook,’ Crawley nods. ‘But you think, “If I get caught on the boundary hooking, then it’s not going to look good.”’ This time it’s him who reaches for the comparison with Atherton: ‘When he was struggling he’d always battle to get 25 or 30 and then it would get better. Perhaps my technique wasn’t quite as solid as his, so when things were going wrong, they were going horribly wrong.’
He’s interesting, Crawley. His sporting past doesn’t seem to hang on him the way it might a player who has gone into the media or coaching. He’s polite, and happy to talk and, in one sense, he’s almost unbelievably ordinary. If you were introduced to him as the local history teacher, I don’t think you’d guess for a second that he had once been an international sportsman. The chief characteristic that I can discern in him is reasonableness, but as to what lies beneath it, I’m at a loss. It’s like the country clothes and the Labradors – is this who he is, who he’s grown into, or a life he’s adopted as his own? Is this the same man who, in earlier incarnations, loved to battle Shane Warne, or hired the Prime Minister’s wife to pursue his case in court? I can’t help but feel there’s something omitted, or just absent. When I ask him his first impressions of Atherton he uses a curiously old-fashioned phrase: ‘I always held him in the highest regard,’ he says. ‘He practised hard, he thought about the game, he was determined to do well. He was very impressive all the way through.’ But when we talk about Shane Warne, he is noticeably more effusive: ‘Wonderful guy, wonderful captain, magnificent bowler.’ I wonder if there’s something I’m missing.
Still, he’s pretty honest about the stuff he didn’t enjoy. That included some of the touring. He struggled with the length of some of the trips abroad and ‘didn’t embrace it perhaps as much as I should have’. He was the victim of an unprovoked assault one night in Cairns, when he and Dominic Cork were walking back to the hotel after dinner. Cork had recalled how sudden and violent it was: ‘I remember hearing this guy go, “Watch this, guys,” and then he just punched him, knocked him down. He looked out cold to me. I picked him off the floor and had to get him home in a taxi.’
Crawley admits he found Australian tours particularly tough. ‘The whole country is against you – if you’re going out to supper, people would say, “You guys are rubbish.” In the end you set up a bunker in the hotel or have dart boards in your room and entertain yourselves that way.’ But really, he reckons, the biggest problem was not being ready for the England call when it came his way. ‘I just wish in hindsight I’d had one more year of county cricket before going into it. But it’s not something you could control.’ I laugh a little – I can’t imagine that if he’d been given the option to defer an England cap for 12 months, he would have given it much consideration. He agrees. ‘Everyone wants to play for England as soon as possible . . . so given the choice at the time, you would jump at it.’
I think of my place at university, the prize I’d worked towards since I was ten. However prepared I thought I was for those stone halls of learning, I was certainly not ready for their freedoms, their cheap booze and their horny young men. Living in halls and making new friends didn’t faze me. My enthusiasm made me popular with the second and third years looking for recruits to college choirs, drama societies and the like. And my sporting knowledge and passion, for the first time in my life, seemed to be interesting to the opposite sex. My experience of romance had been limited to the singular and unlikely heart-throb who stared down from my ceiling wearing Henri Lloyd casual wear, and a single, ill-judged snog on a train platform. I knew that I was playing catch-up with the rest of the female race.
On my second evening at college, in a bar dank with overexcited Freshers, I realised that the boy I was talking to wanted to kiss me. I was surprised, flattered and desperate to make the most of the opportunity; it seemed only seconds later that his large lips were pressed, too hard, against mine. Beneath the foggy mixture of physical sensations – a drunken buzzing in my head, a revulsion at the wetness of the exchange – was a small stabbing thrill I’d not encountered before. I felt proud to have experienced it.
Boys and booze, the two elements that had never interested me as a teenager, quickly became a perpetual distraction. Downing outperformed other Cambridge colleges in only two activities: rowing and drinking. I never stepped in a boat, but I spent plenty of time in the bar. The result was not a dangerous and infamous sexual history but a long string of mostly disappointing snogs that made me cringe with shame. Among the pleasurable moments there were plenty of scratchy chins and clashing teeth, and once the tingle of sexual feelings wore off, I often felt horror, shame, or both. But it still took me a while to learn to say no.
After all those years of swotting at school, I became a lackadaisical student who rose at lunchtime and never bothered with lectures. I still phoned my parents like the good daughter I wanted to be, and whenever I spoke to them I felt conflicted about my secret rebellion. They sounded so pleased that I was having a good time. They didn’t know how often the good times had ended with me throwing a guy out of my room so I could peacefully lie down and vomit into a wastepaper bin.
Talking to Crawley I discover that he was not a model student in the first year either. It’s hard to get any work done when you’re missing an entire term playing cricket in New Zealand. (Note to his current students: he turned it around through the application of hard work in the second year. Please don’t take this as an excuse to slack off.) He recalls freezing his nuts off on the field at Fenner’s, the university cricket ground, preparing for games with lock-ins at the Cross Keys, and gatecrashing May balls. He once attempted to climb his way into one college ball with members of the Combined Services XI: ‘Unfortunately one of the Marines fell off a very high gate and we ended up in A&E because he’d fractured his hip.’
It’s an enjoyable peek at Crawley’s less guarded, less sensible side. But, like me, he’s not keen to dwell on it. The Labradors need feeding, and I take my leave of him and his gorgeous dogs, and drive away. The Carpenters come on the radio and the car is awash with their sepia sound.
I think of Mum, and my last summer in Luton, and the Lancashire cricket jumper that I loved to wear until I put it in the washing machine and shrunk it. When Lancashire had reached the NatWest Trophy final at Lord’s Mum had bought us tickets, and the Lord’s ticket office, perhaps noting our Home Counties postcode, had seated us in a tranche of Essex fans, many of them wearing their team’s custard yellow one-day kit. Essex bowled Lancashire out for the pitiful total of 186; with every wicket that fell, I slumped a little lower in my seat. By the time my mum was getting out the picnic, I felt too sick even to enjoy the pork pie she had bought specially for the occasion. I loved pork pie.
Crawley top-scored the Lancashire innings with 66. When I asked him about it, he told me he thought it was the best he’d ever batted. ‘The ball was just going sideways,’ he said. ‘I remember looking as we watched the Essex lot come off – they’re grinning and chuckling – and thinking, “Well, guys, you don’t quite know what you’re in for. You’ve got to bat on that pitch against Peter Martin, Ian Austin and Glen Chapple.’
What followed was one of the most extreme mood reversals I’ve ever undergone. ‘Such a change! In one moment such a change! From perfect misery to perfect happiness . . .’ I finally knew how it felt to be Harriet Smith in Emma, and asked to dance by Mr Knightley. Martin, the friendly giant known to us fans as ‘Digger’, got a catch behind off Paul Grayson, and another to see off Nasser Hussain. Over in the opposite stand, a group of Lancashire fans had cranked up their favourite chant, and I joined them in a joyous solo: ‘Ooohhh, Lanky-lanky! Lanky-lanky-lanky-lanky-Lancashire!’ My mum, more alert than me to the black looks I was getting, ordered me to sit down and shut up.
But I couldn’t stop my legs from jiggling; I was watching a miracle unfold. With each wicket that followed – and they followed fast – my celebrations became increasingly uncontained. Graham Gooch, the granddaddy of Essex cricket, stuck it out for an hour before Jason Gallian, a man whose medium-pace bowling was scarcely a thing of terror, trapped him lbw. I leapt up in my seat, spraying sandwich crumbs over the already irate opposition fans; Mum and I knew Lancashire had broken them. Chapple – a whippy looking kid with a face covered in freckles and strawberry blond hair – finished with six wickets for 18 runs, Essex were bowled out for 57, and how I escaped a lynching I don’t know. It was all over by early afternoon; as we picked our way back to the concrete stairway, we heard people grumbling about a disappointing game, a terrible wicket, a waste of money. I felt I’d just been at the game of my life.
History is many sided. Despite all these eyewitness accounts I’m compiling of the nineties, I’m finding it hard to get a handle on what being in the England team was really like. There’s fondness in people’s voices as they remember their playing days, but there’s also talk of selfishness. I hear of cliques, but no one admits to being in one. Crawley hasn’t given me much of a steer – he’s spoken about few of his England teammates by name, and his memories of that time were a little colourless, like an overexposed photograph.
So I enjoyed hearing him talk about his Lancashire teammates. There, you could detect real warmth, a place he had, perhaps, found home, at least for a while. ‘It was an unusual situation, because many of the team had grown up with each other,’ he had told me. ‘Some from the north of the county, some from the south, but we all met in the bar after a game, no cliques. Everyone got on really, really well. Not to say there weren’t arguments – but they were proper friendships, basically.’
Here, finally, was the fulfilment of my most cherished teenage imagination, the cricketing life I’d pictured: a band of brothers straining their sinews for each other on the field, and sharing a frothy pint at the end of the day. I’d been right to pick Lancashire all along.